Acolytes Action Squad

Published by Dan Sumption on February 10, 2008 in Photography and Photos. 3 Comments

I just did a very pleasant photoshoot with Brian & Heather of Acolytes Action Squad (one of my favourite bands at the moment). They had an idea which tied in with the accompanying interview, and so we leapt into Heather’s car and I assumed the role of Junior in the back seat. After realising that my 24mm lens would never cut it that close up, I realised that I’d finally found a use for the Peleng fisheye which I borrowed off Gareth about a year ago. It was virtually impossible trying to focus it, and trying to get the scene properly lit without horrendous lens flare, but we got some pretty decent results.

Then I took the photos into Lightroom and started tidying them up and doing the grayscale conversions for Sandman. Lightroom makes it ridiculously easy to adjust the contribution made by various colours to the final B&W mix. I remember Guy telling me years ago how important it is to get this right, but Photoshop’s RGB way of doing it never made much sense to me. With the full spectrum separated out in Lightroom it’s much easier to experiment and see what works and what doesn’t.

Anyway, I got rather carried away. I’m not sure whether I’ll go with the extreme conversion below (made by removing most of the orange from the photo, hence destroying the skin tones) - or if I do, I’ll probably tidy up Heather’s face a bit - but it’s quite fun and seems to fit in with the general spirit of the photo. Seems to work like a partial solarisation, and it works wonders for Brian’s finger and gives his face a nice Darth Maul look.

Original:
Acolyte's Action Squad - photoshoot for Sandman magazine

Edit:
Acolytes Action Squad - photoshoot for Sandman magazine

There’s a couple more photos from this shoot on Flickr (click on either photo above, and find your way to the rest of them…)

Mouse-wobbling blobby things

Published by Dan Sumption on January 21, 2008 in Computer stuff and Dan's Thoughts. 2 Comments

I’ve been spending the last few days on some rather interesting ActionScript challenges. I’ve been building a sort of a lava lamp gloopy movement machine. I’ve been up to my neck in physics and trigonometry, so today when I had to change the way that the mouse moves objects around in the “gloop”, I got too carried away with triangles and tangents before coming home to think, and realising how simple it ought to be. Here’s some fun code, paste it into any MovieClip in Flash: put it on the first frame and then on the last frame, add a simple gotoAndPlay(2) so that the initialisation doesn’t take place twice. Or turn it into a proper object: this is just my quick & dirty version:

reach = 250; // radius of the "force field" around the mouse (pixels)
strength = 10; // strength of the mouse effect, 1-100
speedx = Math.random() * 3; // initial x speed
speedy = Math.random() * 3; // inital y speed

this.onEnterFrame = function ()
{
_x += speedx;
_y += speedy;
if (_x < 0 || _x > Stage.width)
{
speedx = -speedx;
}
if (_y < 0 || _y > Stage.height)
{
speedy = -speedy;
}
distance = Math.sqrt(Math.pow (_xmouse, 2) + Math.pow (_ymouse, 2));
if (power > 0)
{
updateSpeed();
}
power = Math.max (0, reach - distance) / reach;
oldX = _xmouse;
oldY = _ymouse;
}

function updateSpeed()
{
speedx += (_xmouse - oldX) * power * strength/100;
speedy += (_ymouse - oldY) * power * strength/100;
}

You should be able to drag the object around the screen, and throw it off in different directions. Try playing with the range and strength variables for different effects.

Christmas radio. And things.

Published by Dan Sumption on January 8, 2008 in Family Life. 1 Comment

Over the Christmas and New Yea period, I’ve been listening to a lot of Resonance FM via Windows Vista’s UK Radio Sidebar. Heard some wonderful shows, but it’s all been very perplexing. Being a bit of an email junky, I find myself drawn to my PC several times a day, and I usually end up sitting in front of it for far longer than I’d intended, and firing up the radio player to occupy me.

Over Christmas, Resonance have been filling entire days with multiple episode of a single programme. The odd thing is, whenever I switch on the radio player on any given day, nine times out of ten I arrive at exactly the same point of the same show, to within a few seconds, as I did when I last tuned in. The effect can be quite surreal. Last week I switched on the radio four times over the course of a day, and each time heard the phrase “our guest today is the writer Howard Jacobson”. At first it was quite charming, but the novelty is wearing off. Bizarre serendipity, software glitch, or the result of some hidden pattern within my email-collecting/radio listening habit? Perhaps I’ll never know.

Still on the subject of radio, please check out my Christmas family radio show (if you haven’t already): on Christmas day I dragged Gill, Rowan and Lola into the SheffieldLive! studio with me, made them choose some choons, the girls opened presents, Gill and I chatted away, and my extended family got in on the act via the SheffieldLive! chatroom. It was the most fun it’s possibly to have on Christmas morning without involving a team of reindeer, and you can “listen again” here.

New photos - sort of

Published by Dan Sumption on January 5, 2008 in Photos. 2 Comments

Some of my more observant friends have noticed that I’ve hardly uploaded any photos in the last few months. My last set on Danshotme dates from early October, and I’ve only posted half-a-dozen or so pics to Flickr since then.

I have been going through one of those “fallow periods” which will be familiar to all photographers. Of course, whereas in the past a fallow period meant not touching my camera for six months, now it means that I average only one hundred or so photos per week, rather than the usual couple of thousand. And I’ve had neither the time nor the inclination to do much with those photos.

The advantage of this is that, when I finally get around to looking at the pictures taken over this period, they often surprise me with their freshness, because I have had time to forget what they look like. The disadvantage is that I’ll probably never get around to editing them, because it just seems like too big a task.

Anyway, a few of my regular readers (and it seems that I do have them) have been clamouring for more photos. And I’ve sort of been itching to upload some myself. So I have produced a few new sets, but I still haven’t had time to sift and edit them. So these are rather large sets, of photos without any kind of retouching or colour/exposure correction. With those provisos in mind, please enjoy:

Burlesque night, Upstairs at DQ

Published by Dan Sumption on December 28, 2007 in Photos. 0 Comments

Burlesque night, Upstairs at DQ

Christmas on the Radio

Published by Dan Sumption on December 20, 2007 in Family Life, Music and Religion. 0 Comments

The more observant of you may have noticed that 25th December falls on a Tuesday this year. And that my radio show, Empty Space, is also broadcast on a Tuesday.

Next Tuesday I will in the studio as usual, broadcasting across Sheffield and the world. But as Christmas is all about spending time with your family, I’ll be dragging my wife and kids along with me.

I’ll be playing a bit of dark folk and quirky pop. Gill will probably play some songs by ladies with beautiful voices, plus a bit of Ooberman. Lola will, no doubt, want to give her new Pop Party 5 CD a spin. And Rowan will be sitting in the corner refusing to communicate.

Alongside any family dramas, we’ll also have a short radio play, a special localised adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ “The Junky’s Christmas”.

All this, plus mulled wine, mince pies, unwrapping of presents, and perhaps the odd family spat.

We’ll be on, as ever, from 10am until midday, so why not listen in while you’re stuffing the turkey (or roasting your nuts). It’s on 93.2FM and www.sheffieldlive.org

Playlists & podcasts, as ever, at fadwebsite.com/category/radio-show-empty-space/

Communion with the Dead

Published by Dan Sumption on December 8, 2007 in Found on the web and Weird. 0 Comments

My Sumption-radar picked this up the other day.

Havana House

Published by Dan Sumption on November 4, 2007 in It Happened to Me!, Memories and Photos. 2 Comments

Havana House garden

This is a photo of the back garden of our squat - Havana House, on Grove Green Road, Leytonstone (I forget what number we were - around 230 or 240, I think).

The time I spent here, from 1993 to 94, was probably the happiest of my life.

The garden was knocked together with the one next door - the next door house was "the party house", gutted inside, painted black with flourescent designs. Every other weekend, we would hold a massive party - hundreds of people would fill the party house and the garden. These parties were legendary, and passed into East London history.

At the back of the garden, you can see a rubbish tip. All sorts of stuff was buried in here, and it was quite fun to dig around in on an otherwise dull weekend. I once found an old car in there.

We had some sort of electricity feed, though I don’t think we ever paid for it. The party house had gas nicked from the mains - to have a bath, you had to go out through the garden, into the party house, light the pilot light (and hope that the wind didn’t blow it out), then climb up a ladder to the bathroom and start running your bath. You had to keep checking that the water coming out was hot, because that pilot light was forever blowing out. Sometimes you would have to go up and down that ladder several times while waiting for your bath to fill up.

Our only heating was a portable gas heater. Every few weeks you would have to trek over the road to the shop with your empty cannister, then somehow struggle back the couple-of-hundred yards with a full one.

The window panes were cracked and surrounded by gaps. Huge lorries thundered down the street all night and made the glass rattle. Throughout the winter, a cold breeze blew through the panes. Our room was above the garage/lockup, so it was even colder than the rest of the house. Luchie and Michelle were in the other front room, Marie and Laura in the two back rooms, and Brian lived in the darkened chaos of the downstairs room. The slightly feral Ben camped next door in the semi-derelict party house, where he made some sort of a living fixing old TVs.

One morning, I woke up with my bed shaking. The house directly on the other side of my bedroom wall was being pulled down. By the time I got dressed and went outside, all you could see on the other side of our bedroom wall was a bare wallpapered spot hanging out over empty space.

Havana House was knocked down late in 1994 to make way for the M11 link road.

Jibber and Twitch

Published by Dan Sumption on October 28, 2007 in Found on the web and Music. 1 Comment

Empty Space - Sheffield Contemporary Art Radio

Published by Dan Sumption on October 26, 2007 in Art, It Happened to Me! and Music. 1 Comment

I just got my own radio show!

The first “Empty Space” will broadcast on Sheffield Live next Tuesday from 10am until noon (GMT). It will continue every week, either in that slot or at the same time on Friday.

You can listen live at www.sheffieldlive.org - where every show will also be archived as an MP3/podcast - or if you live within a few miles of Sheffield city centre then you can tune your radio to 93.2FM.

The show will be about contemporary visual and audio arts. I’ll have features and interviews on Sheffield events and artists, interspersed with eclectic and experiMental music. I’ll also be working with artists to create some one-off made-for-radio artworks.

If you’re near a computer when the show’s on, please visit the Sheffield Live chat room, where I’ll be hanging out and taking feedback and suggestions.

After (or even during) the show, I’ll be posting track-listings and details of events to FAD, the arts magazine website which I co-edit.

I’m very open to suggestions for features, guests, music, happenings - anything which might work on the airwaves, but which doesn’t usually get an airing.

Please listen and enjoy!